Public relations research

This chapter tells me an important tool for public relations practitioners--research. As we all know, research is a kind of method of gathering information that will provide the basis to establish an understanding of situations or issues, and will also offer us with a better appreciation on context.


Research is often widely used by us to get an understanding of different academic topics, to find a good and comprehensive answer for the questions for almost every subjects. I have to agree this because at the begining of a programme, doing research ensure that the desired outcomes and results are achieved, at the conclusion of the programme, doing research enables us to test whether the desired results were achieved or not.


In fact, research is inevitable for public relations pratitioners who is given a job to do and who needs to know how to do research to help tackling the job, and the application of theory to the practice of public relations. In order to do well in public relations, there are three steps you should get familiar with. The first step is to understand the problem and issues by asking what is the overall context. The second step is to frame the research questions. This means you need to find out what is your research objective and how to get useful material and data. The third step is to design the research activity and understand hwo to deal with these information once you have in your job. Therefore, research is very useful for public relations practitioners.


In conclusion, research method is widely used in our daily lives such as benchmarking, finding out context for a topic etc. For public relations practitioners, research method is especially useful because it helps them tackle problems that happen in their job. Furthermore, qualitative and quantitative methods are some of the widely used in research. However, although research is not as simply as we expected, we cannot study or work without it.